by sean kohler
With the last frost behind us (maybe?), summer seems to be in full swing. The days are long and warm now, and there’s enough daylight to squeeze some life out of the end of a work day. With evening bike rides, farmers markets, and the wildflowers coming in, summer excitement is in the air. Despite the pandemic, the valley is determined to trudge forward into summer. The longer days seem to have brought our community back to life. With bugs and birds flying everywhere, kids and deer running around, and the flowers blooming, everyone is griped in summer excitement. And with this excitement comes a dilemma that I am sure I am not alone in. I want to spend more time outside and I’m ready to grow food, but it’s already June. Is it too late to start gardening?
I talked to Sierra Fairfield-Smith to help me with this dilemma. Sierra has been gardening in the Gunnison Valley for 12 years now, and in that time she has learned quite a bit about gardening here. With this information, she started a company called Sol Food Gardens. A full installation edible garden company. It was at a very special one of these installations jobs that I caught up with her. GCSAPP has partnered with Mountain Roots and Sol Food Gardens to help kick off the Victory Garden Revival at the Tender Foot Preschool. For the last two weeks volunteers from the Health and Human Services center, GCSAPP, Mountain Roots, and Tender Foot have been working to get the new garden installed, and it is looking good.
After setting the fence posts and spreading some mulch, I got to talk to Sierra about what her vision for the garden was, and I had one question on my mind. Is it too late to get started? She informed me that from this point, Tender Foot was going to really take the lead on the garden, with support from the Mountain Roots Farm to School program, but she gave me a bit of insight to what the plan was. The short answer to my question was no. It isn’t too late to start, fact it is still a great time to get a garden started. There is still a lot of plants that you can get started straight from seed, right now, and more that you can do from starters. She told me that the preschool was planing on planting potatoes, lettuce, and radishes with the little ones. If you’re looking for a little more diversity in your garden though, by this point it is too late in the season to get any yield off of most other vegetables starting from seed.
Veggies you would need to transplant from a starter:
-Brassicas: broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kohlrabi,
-summer squashes, beans, or cucumbers,
-peppers, or tomatoes
Veggies you could start from seed:
-Potato starts that are sprouting
-leafy greens such as: kale, lettuce, spinach, arugula, swiss chard
-radishes, beets, carrots, peas,
-and any herbs.
Through their Grow and Give initiative, CSU has put out a lot of information on soil temperatures, germination, and transplanting. Check it out here:
If you already have a garden going, Sierra gave me some good tips of things that she has on her to do list for the up coming week. On the top of her list for the gardens that she looks over, is thinning. Its a dog-eat-dog world out there, and with the warm days in front of us, you want to give your strongest plants the best chance you can. So start thinning out those sprouts. If you’re wanting to transplant any of your sprouts while thinning, make sure to be very careful pulling them out, so that you do not disturb the root structure.
Is your garden looking a little splotchy as the sprouts start coming in? It is a good time to reseed any of the crops mentioned above that you can start from seed still. If you’ve got peas going, odds are they are looking for somewhere to go. If you haven’t already got a trellis set up yet, nows the time to give those little buddies a place to go. And Finally, now is a great time to give your plants a little boost with some compost tea. If you are unfamiliar with compost tea, there is another blog post in the que all about compost tea and nourishing your garden.
With the warm days in-front of us, let’s get those plants in the ground, so we can be bringing in a bountiful harvest for ourselves and our valley this year. If you haven’t already, please feel free to set up a garden consultation meeting with me here. If these days and times don’t work for you, email me at sean@mountainrootsfoodproject.org, and we’ll find a time that works. I look forward to gardening with you all this season. Together we can liberate ourselves from the industrial agriculture system.
—Sean Kohler
